A trauma is a non-daily condition in which our physical integrity was in danger and was experienced with intense emotion or a state of shock. Subsequent stress, called post-traumatic stress, is the following pathological condition that causes disabling symptoms even after the event has occurred for some time.
It is a negative emotional impression that remains engraved in our unconscious after a painful experience generating the presumption that it will happen again, causing us to remain in a state of constant alertness and provoking insecurity. If we experience post-traumatic stress disorder, we may suffer reminiscences in which relive the traumatic situation as if it were happening in the present.
The traumatic event falls within the scope of sports psychotraumatology. Sports trauma refers to a physical experience of a certain severity that compromises the psychic balance of someone who plays sports.
As an overwhelming experience, a trauma is linked to a feeling of helplessness or loss of self-control. It can be intrusive and alter the interpretation of our own skiing. Being traumatized, we may fail to distinguish a real threat from an imaginary one, reliving the experience in the form of flashbacks, recurrent nightmares, hypervigilance, and imagining it happening again.
The general characteristics are the perception of danger, uncontrollability and helplessness in the face of new situations that exceed our coping capacity, significantly affecting our sense of self-efficacy.
The traumatic event may be registered and evoked in the form of images, sounds, and sensations but also by thoughts and emotions. We may recall the image of how the snow from the avalanche buried us, how rapidly we approached the object we collided with, evoke the previous sound of the person who ran over us, recognize having been reckless (reflective thinking), or feeling angry about what happened (emotion).
A traumatic event modifies our attitude towards skiing or towards the mountain and the way we act. The distinctive attitudes as non-traumatized skiers may translate into being convinced of skiing safely, perceiving ourselves as efficient, and skiing or the mountain as something controllable. In contrast, as being traumatized, we view ourselves as vulnerable, flawed, and perceive skiing and the mountain as hostile and uncontrollable.
A positive post-traumatic behavior is one in which we experience a growth due to the adversity, that is, showing a better functioning in relation to the period prior to the event. This evolution is externalized through a greater appreciation for our peers, an increase in compassion, and empathy.
It may also manifest itself through a change in self-perception including a greater sense of strength and resilience or the acceptance of our limits. We may also experience a change in our skiing philosophy and value scale. In traumatic events suffered by the athlete (bodily injury), positive re-athletization occurs when he or she achieves a higher level of functioning through increased awareness or improved proprioceptive sensitivity.
Psychiatrist and psychologist Mardi Horowitz lists some of the possible effects after an event that triggers post-traumatic stress:
- Sudden onset of emotions.
- Continuous preoccupation and rumination of the traumatic event.
- Momentary loss of attention.
- Sudden thoughts that have nothing to do with the task at hand.
- Interference in decision making.
- Hypervigilance and excessive alertness.
- Startle reactions.
- Sleep disturbance.
- Unexpected loss of reality.
It is known that under stressful conditions, our memory functions in a disturbed manner. Traumatic events can maintain easy access to memory or, on the contrary, we may exhibit total or partial amnesia of the event.
A traumatic event suffered in the past that later produced considerable stress may be vividly and accurately retained in our memory, including the details of the context which does not mean that they are accurate.
On the contrary, there are situations of traumatic events that remain forgotten. According to memory psychology professor José María Ruiz-Vargas, this discordance between memories and forgetfulness could be due to survival issues.
It would seem then that when we experience a markedly stressful situation, two memory mechanisms would be activated: one to identify the threatening contexts and the other to forget the unpleasantness of the experience, i.e., we would need certain mental structures to recognize stressful and unpleasant events and others to forget them.
After a traumatic experience we tend to ‘see’ repeatedly what happened, especially when we return to the place of the event, when someone refers to the event or, by association, something comes back to our mind causing the sensation of being in that place.
